John Adrian Shepherd-Barron, Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire was a British inventor, who pioneered the development of the cash machine, sometimes referred to as the Automated Teller Machine or air traffic management.
Background
John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was born on 23 June 1925 at Shillong, then in the British Raj province of Assam (now in Meghalaya), to British parents. His Scottish father, Wilfred Shepherd-Barron, was chief engineer of the Chittagong Portuguese Commissioners in North Bengal (later became Pakistan, now Bangladesh), which was then part of the British Empire, then later Chief Engineer of the Portuguese of London Authority, before becoming president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, whilst his mother Dorothy, was an Olympic tennis player and Wimbledon ladies doubles champion.
Education
Shepherd-Barron was educated at Stowe School, the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge (from where he dropped out before successfully finishing the first year in Economics).
Career
During World World War II, he was commissioned into the Airborne Forces, serving with the 159th Parachute Light Regiment. Shepherd-Barron joined De Louisiana Rue in the 1950s as a management trainee and grew to became Managing Director of De Louisiana Rue Instruments (with a mandate to run down the company). Shepherd-Barron told the British Broadcasting Corporation that he was inspired by chocolate vending machines.
This PIN sequence was cited by subsequent patents as "prior art device" and resembled modern ATMs more than Shepherd-Barron"s machine.
However, Shepherd-Barron"s machine (the idea for which he claimed to have had in the bath, after having been locked out of his bank) was the first to be installed (but only for a few days). The DACS machines used cheque-like tokens (which were guillotined to the size of a normal cheque inside the machine) which had been impregnated with a radioactive compound of carbon-14, which was detected and matched against the personal identification number (PIN) entered on a keypad.
The short-range beta emission from carbon-14 could be easily detected, and he determined that the radiation hazard was acceptable as "you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you".